To Talbot’s surprise, the roots barely reacted as he climbed the long slope. But then, he weighed a quarter of what he did when armored, and his soft-soled boots didn’t have the sharp edges that his armored ones did.
Unencumbered as he might have been, he was still winded in very short time. Damn, but he sure missed the movement-enhancing servos that made climbing in armor easier than walking.
As he pushed himself, step by step, up the slope, he kept his eyes on the trees, veering wide around the hanging vines and suckers. The hook-covered tendrils generally had less than a meter of reach.
Bypassing that, he spotted one of the side-striking tube creatures lurking in a hollow of the roots. That threat he avoided by taking a wide berth behind the thing.
Fact was, when he didn’t upset the roots, he could go more slowly, pick his path. Pay more attention to the forest itself. While he missed the thermal and UV detectors in his heads-up display, he could hear better. Was more aware of the sounds and smells.
And yes, he knew that vinegary smell. Didn’t know what to call the hunched thing that looked like a ball of roots rising from the forest floor, but knew it had two tentacle-filled “hands” and a two-meter reach.
Go wide around that one.
By the time he reached the top of the incline, he was awash with sweat and feeling the first tickling of thirst. In the past, his suit recycled his urine, sweat, and moist breath. Then, to augment the supply, he’d find a trickle of water cascading from the afternoon rains.
He paused to catch his breath on what was obviously a mesa top. Here, Capella’s scattered rays of sunshine pierced the high canopy. The trees were more widely placed, the ground more open. Looking down, he found a thin trace of roots atop the black, cracked, and mostly level bedrock. Threads of white, gray, and wavy bands of glittering crystals ran through the stone.
Talbot took a backsight, fixed his direction, and started off. Without the suit’s computational abilities, his path was mostly dead reckoning. The smoke had to be straight ahead, somewhere.
If it had been the work of men, there’d be sign. Beaten trails, scarred trees, some evidence of human activity to tell him he was close.
No more than fifty meters across the flat, he found the first clue. A stump. Cut long ago, but nevertheless, sheared straight across. He blinked, fought his first instinct to reach out and touch the long-rotten wood. On Donovan, a person didn’t randomly touch anything if he had any sense.
Again he fixed his direction, noting the angle of the sun. A twist of the breeze almost made him gag as it wafted his own stench to his nose. Smelled like something had crawled into his clothes and died. What self-respecting Donovanian creature would lower itself to eating anything as disgustingly unwashed and repulsive as he?
But then back on Earth, vultures, coyotes, jackals, and dogs ate even more vile stuff. Best not to project his finicky sense on the hungry locals.
He kept sniffing, hoping for a hint of smoke or burned wood. Doing so, he again caught an off-vinegary whiff of something. Stopped short. Noticed the oddly shaped boulder, an identical match for the one beside it. Right down to the slash of white quartz-like mineral that ran across it. Two absolutely identical boulders? Not a chance.
Talbot stepped warily around it, realized the pattern was shifting slightly. But for a chance of the light, he’d have missed the three shining black eyes that seemed to flow across the beast’s body as it tracked him.
“Mother, son, and child,” he whispered, keeping well away. “What the hell kind of thing are you?”
Carefully, he retreated, trying to stare all the way around him, wishing he had eyes in the back of his head.
When something bolted away in the gloom to one side, he almost jumped out of his skin. Might have been one of the iridescent-scaled leaf-eaters he’d been shooting and eating.
Think, damn it.
Which way? He didn’t dare get turned around in the maze of similar-looking trees. He picked the shaft of sunlight, Capella light. Whatever. Matched the angle, and took his cue.
How far had he come? One kilometer?
He used to be so good at distances. On the training runs in South Africa, the Sahara, and northern Russia, he’d always been able to gauge the distance. Maybe a sort of subliminal count of his running strides.
Now, for whatever reason, he had no idea.
Warily, he kept his methodical pace, breath slightly labored, his rifle oddly heavy in his out-of-shape arms. One thing was sure, if the four-winged, fantastically colored, swarming predators found him like this, he wouldn’t last five seconds before they carved and chewed him down to the bones.
But if he ran into one of the camouflaged dragon things? Well, that one shot in his rifle had better hit its mark.
One shot.
What if he missed?
Just the thought of it sent a slimy sensation down his backbone.
Careful.
And he was. Every sense hummed on alert. Eyes scanning, nose searching, head cocked to give his slightly better right ear a bit more advantage.
He hoped he was still on track, not veering away from the source of the fire. Damn it, with his suit, he’d have been directed to within meters.
Another stump. Cut cleanly across. A long time ago. This one, too, was mostly rotted out.
On he went, watching the angle of the sun through the high trees.
Then he found the trail. At least, it looked like one. A linear scar through the forest. A rut, though filled with root mat. An anomaly, different from the random jumble of forest he’d spent days living in. Nothing else he’d seen on Donovan left straight lines but humans.
“So, which way?” he wondered. “Go left? Or right?”
And the light was failing, slanting in the late afternoon. What did he have? An hour? Maybe a little more before darkness?
And then what?
He had to have a rock outcrop.
Not that he’d sleep, virtually naked and unarmed as he was.
Which way?
He closed his eyes, willing his heart to slow, and listened.
There, off to his right, a faint, barely perceptible static sound. Call it a white noise. Either it was wind in the trees or a river.
Turning his steps, he prowled ahead as rapidly as he dared. All it would take would be one mistake. A single misstep. A momentary lapse of attention.
Close. He had to be close.
Even then he came within a whisker of disaster. The three-lobed, meter-across leaves, the dangling vines that didn’t quite reach the ground.
Some instinctive and primitive part of his brain caused him to throw himself backward. At the same instant, one of the dangling vines flashed through the space where his head had been but an instant before.
He fell hard on his butt. Crab-like, Talbot scuttled backward until he was well beyond the tree. Safe, he paused, panting, until the feather touch of the roots tickled around his fingers.
Crying out, Talbot lurched to his feet, eased away from the disturbed roots. He tried to swallow his heart back down to where it belonged.
Damn it! Just under the tree’s hanging branches lay his rifle. Discarded in his haste.
“Clap-trapping hell,” he cried.
That was a damned nightmare up there in the mundo tree’s shady heights. Like the one that had caught Garcia. The kind that bored into a person’s body. Yanked them up off the ground, and slowly devoured them from the inside out. For days, if the stories were true.
Somehow, Talbot suspected they were.
Donovanians didn’t exaggerate. Nor did they make up scary fairy tales. They didn’t need to.
From his survival kit, he pulled the small, collapsible grappling hook, quickly tied it onto the coil of thin cable. Designed mostly for freefall work, it nevertheless had a ten-thousand-pound tensile strength. More than enough to pull a rifle out from under a mundo tree.
But how close could he get? He had twenty meters of wire-thin cable.
Creeping forward, he shook out the hook and line. At the edge of the tree, he tossed the hook. Worse, he could see the first filaments of roots threading their way along the rifle’s butt, action, and forearm.
“Screw me, no!” he bellowed, casting again and again, only to have the grapple hook in the roots.
He jerked it free, saw the growing irritation in the roots. The more the roots got jacked up, the quicker they were going to engulf the rifle.
And there, just above the weapon, hung the ever-so-innocent-looking nightmare’s tentacle.
Some tough, toilet-water-sucking marine I am.
He was going to lose his gun, and all because a tree-clinging, man-eating alien had him buffaloed.
But then, that was the thing’s nature, wasn’t it?
“You attack other creatures.” Talbot hung his coil of cable on his belt hook. “What happens if something attacks you? You used to that?”
He hated the idea that popped into his head.
He had to have that rifle.
Which was when something from basic training stirred down in his memory: “Sarge always said, ‘Trust your training, ladies and gentlemen.’”
He slipped his long fighting knife from his belt. The only thing he’d been using it for was cutting up the creatures he’d shot for food. At night, having nothing else to occupy himself, he’d kept it honed to a razor edge.
Nightmares were the meanest beasties in the jungle. They did the attacking. Those were the rules they knew.
I’m out of my fucking mind.
His hammering heart and the jitters in his nerves proved he was right.
Still, if this didn’t work. If the thing got him, jerked him up into the tree, he’d use his knife to sever a femoral artery. No being digested alive for Mark Talbot.
Step by step, he advanced, balanced, every sense on edge, his rapt gaze fixed on that closest tentacle. It hung there, for all purposes dull, dumb, and lifeless. A hairy, greenish-blue, plant-looking strand maybe two centimeters thick.
Damn. How close could he get? He kept his pace even, fought to keep breath in his fear-tight lungs.
“Easy. Easy,” he kept repeating, his right arm tensed and at the ready. The knife handle felt snug in his grip.
“Nightmares do the attacking. Go on, twitch, you pus-sucking son of a bitch.”
One more step.
He tensed, body coiled, and lunged. Slashed. The keen edge of his blade bit deep. Through it, Talbot felt the nightmare stiffen, helping his blade bite as he severed the tentacle.
In one swooping move, he tore the rifle from the roots, pouring every ounce of energy into his flight as he ran out from under the menace of those overhanging branches.
Stopping short, he bent double, the thrill of adrenaline coursing through his veins.
“Yeah? Take that, you piece of . . .”
Something moved behind him.
Talbot whirled, slapped the rifle’s butt into his shoulder. He was drawing aim when he stopped short. Standing there . . . was a little girl?
A very human little girl. Blue-eyed, with tangled blonde hair. Talbot wasn’t any expert when it came to children, but he guessed her at maybe nine years old. She wore a leather skirt, what looked like a thin-fabric blouse, and knee-high boots crafted of some soft leather.
Even more to his surprise, she had her arm around the shoulders of a miniature version of one of the three-eyed, dragon-dinosaur predators that had tried to kill him. The thing was perched on its back two legs, claws curled and ready on the three-fingered forefeet. Colors were flashing and rippling across its hide like a psychotic rainbow.
The little girl cocked her head skeptically. “Either you’re trying to get killed, or you’re really stupid.” Then her nose wrinkled. “And you smell like rotten garbage.”